


It's an origins story

by nyargles



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Science Babies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-26
Updated: 2013-09-26
Packaged: 2017-12-27 16:27:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/981102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nyargles/pseuds/nyargles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not a very exciting origins story. It's not like Tony Stark becoming Iron Man or the tale of Captain America. It's not about their abusive childhoods or freak accidents being the cause of special powers. It's about a lot of hard work and a lot of swearing. It's about tears and dreams and talking too much, too quickly, and professors who didn't believe in their genius. It's Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons and SHIELD. It's Fitz-Simmons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's an origins story

**Author's Note:**

> Bear in mind I wrote this just after the pilot ep aired. Pretty much all of the details are probably going to be completely wrong in a few weeks.

It's not a very exciting origins story. It's not like Tony Stark becoming Iron Man or the tale of Captain America. It's not about their abusive childhoods or freak accidents being the cause of special powers. It's about a lot of hard work and a lot of swearing. It's about tears and dreams and talking too much, too quickly, and professors who didn't believe in their genius. It's Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons and SHIELD. It's Fitz-Simmons.

Leo Fitz is the third of four brothers. His oldest brother is a doctor. The second one is a lawyer. The youngest is dead. It's pretty hard living up to any of them. Leo is a small, lively child who spends half of his sentences running ahead in incomprehensible (but entirely logical) sentences, and the other half catching up with how far behind everyone else is.

Jemma Simmons is the only daughter of a baker. She spent the years after learning to walk at a wooden counter covered in flour with her fingers in all the pies. She was a slightly overweight child as a result of too many pastries and a dramatically underweight teenager as a result of being an overweight child.

Jemma is both wonderful and horrific at cooking. She cannot for the life of her manage a tart that doesn't look like bits of dough decided to go swimming in a sea of strawberry jam. It does, however, generally taste excellent. She wouldn't know. She doesn't eat the tarts she makes any more, and cultivates self-control made of pure adamantium. (Jemma doesn't eat a tart again until she turns eighteen, and finally realises that skinny is not nearly as satisfying as, well, being satisfied.)

Leo tells his father when he is eight that he wants to create things: beautiful, useful things. His father suggests he become a violinist. His mother buys him hundreds and hundreds of Lego sets. Leo is rather bad at building things. His cars look like misshapen rugby balls and the cat cries because it is literally impossible to walk across the living room floor without stepping on a Lego piece. It's not until Leo is fifteen that he realises that wanting to create things does not mean that he has to physically build them himself.

Leo meets Jemma for the first time when they start sixth form. They sit three rows apart in Biology and they are the two kids younger than everyone else because they've skipped a year somewhere. It's love at first sight for Leo when Jemma is picked on to answer a question because she is reading a different book; she answers the question perfectly, no hesitation, no question mark at the end. It might have been love, but they don't get together until the end of the year, and then they break up a week after that because they're both kind of married to science by this point.

(Jemma meets Leo for the first time in Year Nine. She's on her way home when there are a couple of older boys pushing around a younger one. 'Fucking Scottish freak', they call him. 'Making us look bad', they said, 'open your mouth again and you won't be able to close it again.' Jemma takes a different route home. She doesn't tell Leo about it for years and years and then Leo doesn't speak to her for a month until he turns up in the night and climbs in her window to tell her about his new flight-capable mini-robot, and then it's all right.)

 

They go to different universities. They split Oxbridge between them, with Leo going to Oxford and Jemma going to Cambridge. They don't get in contact for months on end, disappearing into their respective bubbles of shiny, newly-found science, and emerge only to babble excitedly, overlapping and talking over each other. They both master the skill of being able to listen and talk at the same time.

(They also both master selective hearing, but that's a different story.)

They test in for SHIELD at the same time, though they don't know it. Jemma's trying to get a position as a research assistant in a lab in central London the summer before starting her Master's degree; Leo's trying to get a position as anything, seriously, he doesn't mind being an architect's personal assistant for the summer as long as it pays. Architecture is also about designing things to be built, right?

The rest of the interview candidates are architecture students and Leo has not felt more out of place in his life. (Well, he lies – he has, but it's been a while.) They're given blueprints for – something, Leo has no idea what – and asked to identify the pros and cons of this design. Leo doesn't chitchat. He spends three minutes studying the blueprints in complete silence, and then points out two fatal flaws. The interviewer hums.

In an interview, Jemma correctly identifies six different samples from different animal and says, puzzedly looking at the seventh, "I don't know what that is. It doesn't look like anything from Earth." (Somewhere in New York, her name appears on a list.)

Fitz met Simmons for the first time in New York when he's working on trying to reverse engineer some of Tony Stark's crazy brain children, which is rather difficult given that he's trying to do it from _videos of Tony Stark_ as opposed to things like prototypes and blueprints and physical samples.

"You need to recallibrate for the air pressure that far above the ground," says a voice, and Fitz bristles.

"I _know_ – Jemma?" He blinks up at her several times.

"Leo!" She beams down at him, and sweeps him into a hug right in front of all his superior scientists. Three of them frown.

"Agent Fitz. Agent Simmons. It appears you are acquainted. Could we please try working for a bit now?" says Daniels, the Chief Mechanic.

Fitz becomes Fitz-Simmons when their departments are collaborating on a chemical agent and a way to disperse it safely and someone calls for him. "Fitz! Fitz? Oh, for – Simmons! Get Fitz!" From then on, the tactic catches on around the lab. Fitz' attention is best caught by getting a hold of Simmons. 

Once, someone asks Simmons where Fitz is and Jemma gives them a blank look. "I don't know?" She goes back to work. Half the lab freaks out. SHIELD security starts searching for Fitz in a grid formation. Ten minutes later, Fitz rolls out from underneath the photocopier in the corner he'd been meaning to fix for the last month or so and asks, "What's everyone looking for?"

"No idea," says Simmons distractedly, and lets him steal half her sandwich as the entire lab gapes.

Simmons, on the other hand, becomes Fitz-Simmons when the Battle of New York descends. They're aboard the helicarrier that day that Loki decides to visit. She races to her computer and opens up a program that she wrote as the entire lab lurches sideways. The screen remains blank. That means Fitz is still alive, and uninjured. They work for a shady government agency these days; it's perfectly reasonable to have injected her best friend with a chemical tracker just in case. After all, Fitz regularly uses her to test out his new mechanical arm, which he insists will one day be useful to people who've lost limbs.

She opens up the app for it on her phone and sees a dot that represents him, blipping from a different lab. She races for the corridor. The dot is moving towards her, she notices. "Simmons!" She can hear him yelling now, and she stumbles forward to meet him.

He's out of breath when they meet each other halfway, and he's holding his phone the exact same way she's holding hers, with a little orange dot labelled 'Jemma'. 

"I – are you tracking me?" She asks indignantly.

"Yes? Are _you_ tracking _me_? How are you tracking me? You're useless at mechanics," he demands.

"It's a chemical tracker! Did you put a _piece of metal_ inside me?!" She hits him.

"Owww!" Fitz rubs his arm. "Yes, because that's _so_ much worse than being slightly radioactive. It's in your tooth. Remember the last time you needed a filling?"

They scowl at each other until the helicarrier stutters and they get thrown sideways in the corridor. They teeter back and forth until they reach a door that should take them to an evac point, and make a dash for it.

"I can't believe you put a lump of metal in my tooth," she grouses, and then gives him a quick hug. "I'm glad you're not dead."

"Me too," he says. "I forgot to phone my mum this week."

"I phoned her for you."

The aftermath of the battle was the most difficult. The science labs were the emptiest they had ever been – some people were evidently fine with creating weapons but felt queasy about experimenting with alien tech. The bio-chem department merged with the mechanics department because suddenly they had to examine things that were both mechanical and bio-chemical. 

Simmons was the only one willing to poke her hands into alien goo with no more protection than a pair of latex gloves, and Fitz was the only one who understood what she found. They got shuffled off into a corner of their own to examine bits of dead Chitauri and discuss how to make weapons that would affect their physiology and the rest of the department got on with more important things.

At least, that was how it was until the day Assistant Director Maria Hill called them up to her office together.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [It's an origins story [podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1042939) by [vocative](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vocative/pseuds/vocative)




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